Department of Homeland Security to begin social media monitoring program

The government may soon be following your Facebook updates without you realizing it

by Fox Van Allen | Last updated 7:29PM EST on January 25, 2012
If you're unsettled by the idea of Google maintaining a massive database of your every move on the internet, you're sure to be upset by this: Your government plans to start stalking your every move on Twitter and Facebook to make sure you're not a terrorist.

The creepy, Big Brother-esque program hasn't started yet — the Department of Homeland Security has only begun seeking bids from contractors to build the spy network. But according to a government report, the DHS wishes to conduct "publicly available social media monitoring" effort to detect threats, vulnerabilities, and "bad actors." In other words, the U.S. government wants to get the bad guys' geotagged status updates — whomever the government determines those bad guys to be.